Sunday, December 23, 2007

Last Saturday night was our church's Women's Ministries annual Christmas party. Our ladies always look forward to this party each year, to celebrate the birth of our Savior, and to celebrate the love and friendship we have with one another because of Christ's love for us. Along with my friend Becky from the Pink Chandelier, and my friend Esther from Esther's House of Cards, we worked all week long to decorate and create a beautiful and elegant setting for this year's party. Here's a few pics of how it all turned out. Remember a couple of months ago I posted about shopping at the Dollar Tree store and found all these great floral items that I was planning to use for making the decorations for this party. So these....turned into this...This was the completed project. I "stole" this idea from The ParTea Planner. When I saw it on her blog I thought is was so beautiful and spectacular that I had to do it for this party. Hubs helped engineer and construct the whole pole system going on here...These were just some of the rest of the decorations in the room...Remember in a couple of different previous posts, I talked about collecting these jars. Well, this is how I used them. We had several of our ladies bake their favorite cookie recipes and bring them to the party. We put them in these jars and had little bags available for everyone to take a few cookies home to share with their families...Ummm, good!Then I made these little paper bag albums with all the recipes from the cookies the ladies made, one for each person...Theses were just Christmas "words" that I printed in gold lettering then framed and made this display with gold tress from the 99 Cent Store...After working so long and so hard on all these decorations, I didn't have it in me to do anything at my house this year. That's why I just put up the little tree that I showed you in the last post. I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year!

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Well, here it is, only 6 days before Christmas and I'm totally not ready for it to happen at all this year. It's not just a "Bah, Humbug!" sort of day, but it's been like that since Thanksgiving, which is when I normally kick into high gear and start the Christmas decorations and baking and shopping. Normally I decorate the entire house, inside and out, bake dozens of cookies, plan an elaborate dinner for Christmas day and wrap all the gifts in color-coordinated papers and ribbons and embellishments. Well, this year, none of that is happening. Today I put up a silver table-top tree with pink and blue decorations on it. My kid came home from school and said it looked like a baby shower tree. In all of my nearly 28 years of marriage, I have always had a tall green tree. In the early years we used to get a real tree, but for about the last 10 or 12 years I finally resorted to going artificial, although still green and full height of at least 7 feet. I shot my wad, so to speak, on our church Women's Ministries annual Christmas party. I planned the decorations for that for about the last 3 months now, and it all came together and turned out beautifully this past Saturday nite. So, for me, that was my big Christmas "hurrah", and at home, all we're getting is this little thing. To me it looks like a Charlie Brown tree. At least it has some handmade ornaments on it that made probably about 15 years ago, and the silver tree, although brand new, is vintage looking. I remember as a kid my mother would always have a silver tree like this and I always hated it. It would get one color of bulbs on it (royal blue) and have one of those color wheels spinning four different colors on it as it went around. I always wanted to have a green tree, but we always had that silver thing. I suppose that's why when I got married I insisted that we have a green tree. Maybe instead of feeling "Bah, humbug!" this year, I'm feeling a little nostalgic. Nah, it's still "Bah Humbug!"